The Lawyer Who Saved Lennon

I was such a musical illiterate back in the day that I was routinely mocked in high school when a friend discovered that I could not name the four Beatles. One morning late in 1980, this same classmate spotted me in the halls and held up three fingers. “You only have to remember three now,” he said morbidly.

John Lennon had died the previous night.

Left to my own devices forty-one years later, I probably would not have sought out a nonfiction book entitled Lennon, the Mobster & the Lawyer (Devault-Graves Books, 2021) if I hadn’t met the author at a book event last fall.

It was the same weekend that Hurricane Helene bore down on our region in Appalachia. At the time of the storm, I was at a book event in Charleston when I overheard a gentleman named Jay Bergen tell a group of writers and hosts how he had come late in life to write his one and only John Lennon story, and how, when the book was done and published, he donated five banker boxes of legal documents in his possession to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Because of my hearing issues, my brain sometimes has to replay for me what my ears have heard. Oh shoot, I said to myself later, this guy was John Lennon’s lawyer!

It’s a riveting story whose prelude began in 1970, when Lennon was sued by record producer Morris Levy over alleged similarities between Lennon’s song, “Come Together,” and Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me.”

The real-life inspiration for the fictional Hesh Rabkin character on The Sopranos, Levy had a longstanding habit of attaching himself as a songwriter to the copyrights of his performers’ songs, thus ensuring for himself a forever share of their royalties. An associate of the Genovese crime family, he was a violent individual who had once beaten a cop so badly that the officer lost an eye. Levy filed frivolous lawsuits to bully people into paying him cash or to extract otherwise juicy commitments.

Predictably, the two parties settled out of court, with Lennon agreeing to record three songs that Levy owned the rights to on Lennon’s next album. Lennon, by then a solo artist, was such a star that Levy was sure to be adequately compensated by whatever royalties flowed his way.

Except, the production of that next album bogged down. The record, which Lennon intended to be a collection of oldies that he’d long admired, became a “problem” project. For one thing, its producer, the legendary Phil Spector, flaked and absconded with the master tapes. Lennon moved on to another album, Walls and Bridges, which became his fourth solo release when it arrived in stores September 1974. Assuming Lennon had reneged on their agreement, Levy threatened to sue. Lennon mollified the manipulative hothead by informing him that twenty-eight boxes of the oldies tapes had been finally recovered. Listening to them again, Lennon felt some of the songs were salvageable but a lot would need to be re-recorded. He assured Levy that the oldies album would be released…soon.

Levy grew increasingly impatient for his expected payday. Since the two men lived in New York City, Levy kept insinuating himself into Lennon’s life, badgering him to visit Levy’s nightclub, inviting Lennon to Disney World in Florida so their families could hang out, and to his horse farm in upstate New York, where Lennon and his fellow musicians rehearsed.

Every time they met, Levy tried to persuade Lennon to let him release the album. Lennon always brushed him off. Lennon had an exclusive deal with EMI stretching back to his days with the Beatles. The firm alone decided how his music was marketed. Levy knew this, but was ever the noodge.

Lennon did not regard Levy as a friend, but he found it hard to say no. So when Levy asked if he could hear some of the recordings Lennon had made of “his” songs, Lennon sent over a rough cut, reel-to-reel tape of the entire album—sixteen songs in all—hoping to get Levy off his back.

With the tape in hand, Levy must have realized that every creative person he’d ever bilked was small potatoes compared to Lennon and the artistic firmament he had at his disposal. “I’m gonna put it out!” Levy shouted in his office in front of witnesses. “I’ve got a shot! I’ve got a shot!”

In 1975, Levy announced to the world that his (s)crappy record company would release Lennon’s new album, which Levy called Roots and which he planned to market via cheesy television ads. Of course Capitol Records/EMI filed an injunction. In a pair of lawsuits, Levy sued Lennon, EMI, and Capitol Records, claiming Lennon had breached a verbal agreement permitting Levy to release the album. He claimed damages of $42 million, a laughable figure designed to rattle his opponents and force them to capitulate to a high-dollar settlement.

Enter Mr. Bergen, whose job it is to save John Lennon’s musical reputation, stop the bootleg album in its tracks, and keep John from having to pay millions to settle.

When he enters the story, Mr. Bergen is a young but seasoned litigator. The lawyer and the musician are both in their thirties and conflicted fathers who long to make amends with the children from their previous marriages.

Consisting as it does of court transcripts, legal maneuvers, and scenes of the two men roaming Manhattan in between depositions and court appearances, the book shouldn’t work but does. As they walk the streets, visit New York landmarks Lennon has never visited, eat lunch in dives and legendary restaurants alike, they form an unlikely but charming bond. Lennon comes to life as a decent fellow who always has time to sign autographs for fans as long as they agree not to bug him when he’s eating or tail him everywhere he goes.

Summoned to Lennon’s Dakota apartment on the West Side, Mr. Bergen is grilled by Yoko Ono, who, while noshing on caviar, stresses that they must keep the settlement figure down. She and everyone else assumes that Lennon will have to pay; they just want to keep him from paying big. Admittedly, Lennon’s case suffers from some glaring inconsistencies. If Lennon didn’t like and trust Levy, why did he spend so much time with him? Why did he and his musicians rehearse at Levy’s farm? If Lennon didn’t want Levy to release the album, why did he give Levy a tape of the entire record?

Mr. Bergen may well be a suit (that’s him in the dark, pinstriped suit in the 1976 Bob Gruen photo shown on this page) but he’s got the soul of a rock ’n’ roller. The moment he heard the Penguins sing “Earth Angel” on the radio back in high school, he fell in love with the form. When Elvis made a rare east coast appearance in 1957, young Mr. Bergen ordered two mail-order tickets from the venue—only $3.50 each!—but could not find a single college classmate at Fordham who wanted to make the long bus trip to Philly to see the pre-glitter King’s performance in a cavernous but half-populated ice hockey arena. Lennon, who idolized Elvis, demands a beat-by-beat recounting of Jay’s experience, which his lawyer is happy to provide. In short, Jay loves rock ’n’ roll. Chiselers like Levy sicken him. And if he can help it, his client will not pay a freaking dime.

In a scene that made me laugh, Mr. Bergen decides he will fly to Los Angeles and Detroit to interview the session musicians who witnessed Lennon’s interactions with Levy. Seeking to blend in, Mr. Bergen decides to leave his suits at home and dress casually. What sort of attire will put rock musicians at ease? We watch as he hilariously buys his first pair of cowboy boots, western-style shirts with snap buttons, and a crisp pair of black jeans that he washes a few times to break in. (It’s an aesthetic that will become Mr. Bergen’s sartorial preference later in life.)

Author publicity photo by Paul Mehaffey

Mr. Bergen’s key courtroom strategy is to get Lennon to recount exactly how he creates a song, records it, and polishes it before releasing it to the world. On the witness stand, Lennon’s creative process unfolds, and we (and the court) grasp that the rough cut tapes Lennon shared with Levy were never intended to be released. Doing so would have been like us writers allowing a digest magazine to publish the first draft of one of our short stories.

After the Lennon case, Mr. Bergen’s professional and personal life shifted. He built a lucrative practice representing rock stars, baseball teams, and even George Steinbrenner of the New York Yankees. In time Mr. Bergen loosened up, let his hair down (literally and figuratively), remarried for a third time, and retired to our mutual corner of the southeast, where neighbors and local writers motivated him get his story down on paper. His book is a fine addition to his Nashville publisher’s long-running Great Music Book series.

In December 1980, like the rest of the world, Mr. Bergen was devastated to learn of the murder of his friend at age 40. These days Jay Bergen tells audiences that he is haunted by the fact that he missed seeing Lennon five days before his passing. John was in the same recording studio where Mr. Bergen was visiting a client, but Yoko was being weird, and Mr. Bergen did not permit himself the liberty to knock on a few of those studio doors to say hello (and goodbye).

Had he lived, Lennon might well have written books or granted interviews that shed even more light on his creative process. But since he was taken from us far too soon, we are lucky to catch a glimpse of that artistry in this story. We are lucky too that Mr. Bergen, now in his eighties, is around to help us imagine it all.

* * *

You can inspect some artifacts in Mr. Bergen’s Lennon archives here.

See you in three weeks!

— Joe

josephdagnese.com

John Lennon's Sherlock Holmes Pastiche

featuring William Burton McCormick

Sherlock Holmes pastiches are a cottage industry. New adventures or parodies of the world’s most famous literary detective by authors other than his creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle have existed since the nineteenth century and include such well-known scribes as Mark Twain, Stephen King, John Dickson Carr, Jeffrey Deaver, Loren D. Estlemen, Anne Perry, Michael Kurland, Nicholas Meyer, Edward D. Hoch, Dorothy L. Sayers, Michael Moorcock, Neil Gaiman, Conan Doyle’s son Adrian and several SleuthSayers members among the thousands of other writers worldwide. One name that may not immediately come to mind is John Lennon.

Yes, that John Lennon.

A little background. From his boyhood to his time at the Liverpool College of Art to the early days of the Beatles, Lennon kept a scrapbook where he’d scribble poetry, cartoons, and nonsensical stories in the Lewis Carroll “Jabberwocky” tradition. The best of these were collected for the book In His Own Write, published in March,1964.

With the advent of Beatlemania, In His Own Write was assured commercial success selling 300,000 copies in England alone. More surprising, given the hostility towards the Beatles as a “teenage fad” at the time, was the effusive praise it received from establishment critics. Many compared the best passages to Carroll and James Joyce. 

In the wake of its critical and commercial success, other musical artists began to write and publish their own poetry, most notably rival Bob Dylan. (Inspired by In His Own Write, Dylan began working on poems in 1965 that would be collected in Tarantula (1971).) But Lennon did not have the option to wait as long as Dylan. A follow up was demanded to In His Own Write. One to be published the next year.

This was no easy task for Lennon. The Beatles were in the midst of a world tour, required to record two albums and numerous singles in ‘64, film A Hard Day’s Night and heavily promote everything. What’s more, Lennon had used up his backlog of poems and stories for In His Own Write. Everything for the next volume would have to be from scratch.

He carved out time do some (non-song) writing, when vacationing in Tahiti with his wife Cynthia, bandmate George Harrison, and Harrison’s then girlfriend Pattie Boyd in May,1964. Their private boat was stocked with a few English-language books including a Sherlock Holmes omnibus.  After reading the collection, Lennon reasoned that all Holmes stories were essentially the same and decided to include a parody in his next book. That book was A Spaniard in the Works (June,1965) and the parody was "The Singularge Experience of Miss Anne Duffield” written by Lennon with the aid of Cynthia, George and Pattie over several bottles of Johnnie Walker while at sea.

As can be guessed from the title "The Singularge Experience of Miss Anne Duffield” is a nonsense-language story. At just under two thousand words, it is the longest piece of prose Lennon ever published. (He jokingly called it his novel). If you’re looking for the vivid imagery found in such Lennon songs as “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” or “Across the Universe” you won’t find it here. Instead, this is a tongue-in-cheek Liverpudiian pun-fest that owes more to The Goon Show and the gobbledygook language “Unwinese” created by British comic Stanley Unwin than any nineteenth century Lewis Carroll “Jabberwocky."

The opening lines are:

I find it recornered in my nosebook that it was a dokey and winnie cave towart the end of Marge in the ear of our Loaf 1892 in Much Bladder, a city off the North Wold. Shamrock Womlbs had receeded a telephart whilst we sat at our lunch eating.

This can be loosely translated in a more Arthur Conan Doyle way as:

I find it recorded in my notebook it was a dark and winter day towards the end of March in the year of our Lord 1892 in Manchester, a city of the north world. Sherlock Holmes had received a telegram while we sat at our lunch eating.

The fun is in deciphering the heaps of puns piled atop each other and the way Lennon apes Holmes story conventions. If you enjoy word play, 1960’s British in-jokes and groan-inducing puns, then this may be the Holmes pastiche for you. If not, or you find it “all a bit silly” (as Harrison’s friend Eric Idle might say) you may prefer to encounter Lennon’s wit on Abbey Road rather than Baker Street.

The plot (as much as there is one) sets Shamrock Womlb and his friend Doctored Whopper against a Jack the Ripper doppelganger Jack the Nipple who is “a sex meany of the lowest orgy.” (Did he invade Pepperland later?) When challenged Jack admits “‘I'm demented’ he said checking his dictionary, ‘I should bean at home on a knife like these.’”

Groan you might, but Lennon is the one writer to reveal the true source of the great detective’s amazing deductive powers in a dash of metafiction. Wolmbs, it turns out, knows all because he’s “seen the film” while Doctored Whopper remains at a disadvantage having “only read the comic.” So now we know.

There are titular jokes afoot too. While the story is filled with many characters including a prostitute Mary Atkins, her pimp boyfriend Sydnees, an escaped prisoner Oxo Whitney (who terrifies Whopper’s imagination) and the Lestrade stand in Inspectre Basil, there is no appearance or mention of a character named Miss Anne Duffield despite being in the title. This mirthful twist is the penultimate red herring (Yes, penultimate… wait and see). You thought this was about Anne Duffield? Well, think again.

A recurring gag throughout the piece is Lennon’s lampooning of the famous refrain “Elementary my dear Watson.”  (Holmes aficionados well know that this phrase is not found in any of Conan Doyle’s stories but appears to have been first recorded by P.G. Wodehouse in 1909 and became familiar with the greater public as a result of the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes films of the 1930’s and 1940’s).

In Lennon’s work, the phrase becomes:

“Ellifitzgerrald my dear Whopper,”

and “Eliphantitus my deaf Whopper,”

and “Alibabba my dead Whopper,” 

and “Alecguiness my deep Whopper,” etc., etc.

“Elementary, my dear Watson” never appears in canonical Conan Doyle. It never appears in noncanonical Lennon either. Some purity in that.

I must now talk about the ending. The vast majority of the original Holmes stories are told from the point-of-view of Dr. John Watson, supposedly recalling cases from years earlier with startling detail. Every clue, every movement and emotion are remembered by Watson’s vault of a mind in his chronicling of Holmes’s adventures for posterity. Some have commented on Watson’s amazing clarity.

Additionally, in many stories, Holmes leaves Watson’s presence, only to return with new information and miraculously solve the case. Well, in Lennon’s pastiche these tropes appear as well.  Shamrock Womlb leaves without explanation, causing Doctored Whopper to curse his friend: “‘Blast the wicker basket yer grannie sleeps in.’ I thought ‘Only kidding Shamrock’ I said remembering his habit of hiding in the cupboard.” When Shamrock returns [SPOILERS] he apparently reveals the solution to Whopper but then Whopper says… “I poked the fire and warmed his kippers, when he had minicoopered he told me a story which to this day I can't remember.”

Yes, whole story is a red herring. The good Doctored didn’t record the ending…

The joke is on us. The solution is lost to Whopper’s fading memory.

Or Johnnie Walker.

On a boat off Tahiti.

Maybe that’s where Miss Anne Duffield went.

---

William Burton McCormick is a Shamus, Derringer and Claymore awards finalist. His two latest releases are the historical thriller novella A STRANGER FROM THE STORM and the modern espionage thriller KGB BANKER (the latter co-written with whistleblower John Christmas).